Satisfying Customers - the Basics and Beyond

Earlier this week, I helped facilitate a yearly business conference for one of our clients, AM Castle. Castle is a supplier of specialty metals and supply chain solutions to a variety of industries, including aerospace and oil and gas. We’ve been working with them over the past year to help them create a better and more consistently positive experience for their customers.

They’re a great client: very serious about and committed to doing this work, and approaching it in a truly strategic way. One of the things they realized (smartly) is that they needed to start by improving their basic interactions with the customer. They call it “table stakes,” and it includes a higher percentage of on time delivery, shorter lead times, and faster response to customer inquiries, among other things.

I think it’s a good and necessary thing that companies are focusing beyond “customer service” and looking at the whole customer experience. Making sure that your customers have a thoroughly positive experience when dealing with you can be a huge competitive advantage.

But – and it’s a big but – if you don’t have the basics just right, all the specialized solutions, skillful listening, and resourceful responses to unique needs in the world aren’t going to make your customers happy. Customers want your products or services to be on-time, good quality, available when they need them, and fairly priced. THEN you can start focusing on additional ways of making the transaction or the relationship truly and distinctly positive.

When you do both the basics and the higher-order stuff well, that’s when you build customers for life.